“Cut Flowers,” Zin Taylor’s first solo show at Susan Hobbs Gallery, featured an inventive, intriguing range of sculptural statements: Works performed semantic slides between functional product and absurd abstraction. Incorporating Taylor’s trademark vocabulary of dots, lines, patterns, textures, and reductive shapes, the show playfully provoked speculation about how (and why) abstract elements can take on tentative character traits, sometimes striking notes of existential dread or whimsical wonder. Taylor’s approach is to arrange objects with particular qualitiesthe same scale or palette, for examplein clusters, as though he were testing a range of new products, implying the potential for expansive production (and display). In his hands, however, this potential is complicated, as it intersects with other material associationssometimes spiritual or social, sometimes